Banning Sugary Drink Sales at Work Could Shrink Your Waistline

Sodas and other sugar-sweetened drinks may taste great, but research has increasingly linked them with obesity and potentially fatal health issues. Now, for the first time, a new study has shown the surprising health benefits of banning the sale of these sugary drinks in the workplace.
Published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, the study found that 10 months after the University of California, San Francisco halted the sales of beverages with added sugars on campus, employees cut their daily intake by nearly 50 percent.
By the end of the study, the researchers could see the effects of that reduction, literally: on average, the participants had lost belly fat and trimmed their waist sizes by nearly an inch, Reuters reported.
The benefits didn't stop there, either. Participants who cut back more on sodas and sugary drinks also happened to improve their bodies' sensitivity to insulin, which regulates blood sugar. Insulin resistance issues tend to precede type 2 diabetes, according to Forbes. Participants' Body Mass Index was not significantly affected, however.
"This was an intervention that was easy to implement," lead author Elissa Epel, director of the Aging, Metabolism, and Emotions Center at UCSF, told The New York Times. "It's promising because it shows that an environmental change can help people over the long run, particularly those who are consuming large-amounts of sugary beverages, and possibly even lead to a reduction in their risk of cardiometabolic disease."
Nine other University of California branches are planning similar bans on sugary drink sales and campaigns to promote healthier options, the Times reported.
For the study, the researchers examined 214 employees at UCSF with an average age of 41 years — 29 percent of the men and 47 percent of the women were obese, MinnPost reported — before and after the ban took effect in 2015. Most worked in service or technical positions. Before the study, the employees averaged 35 ounces of sugar-sweetened drinks per day.
Half of the group was given access to a brief motivational interview with a health educator regarding the health effects of sugar and strategies for cutting back. They also received periodic check-in calls from the health educator.
Average consumption across all participants dropped to 18 ounces within months of the sales ban, but obese employees in the group that received the motivational interviews saw the largest changes, according to The New York Times. Their intake of sugar-sweetened drinks dropped by more than 25 ounces to 9.6 ounces, or 70 percent, on average, HealthDay reported. That said, the study was limited by its lack of a control group, as everyone was exposed to the ban, and by the study's short duration.
According to the study, sugary drinks make up 34 percent of the added sugars in the American diet, but "workplace sales bans may offer a promising new private-sector strategy for reducing the health harms" associated with sugary drinks.
"Encourage your employer to create a healthier workplace food environment or start a movement yourself to stop sales of sugar-sweetened beverages — this is actually how the sales ban at UCSF started," senior author and UCSF professor Laura Schmidt told Reuters.
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- Redwoods are the world's tallest trees.
- Now scientists have discovered they are even bigger than we thought.
- Using laser technology they map the 80-meter giants.
- Trees are a key plank in the fight against climate change.
They are among the largest trees in the world, descendants of forests where dinosaurs roamed.
Pixabay / Simi Luft
<p><span>Until recently, measuring these trees meant scaling their 80 meter high trunks with a tape measure. Now, a team of scientists from University College London and the University of Maryland uses advanced laser scanning, to create 3D maps and calculate the total mass.</span></p><p>The results are striking: suggesting the trees <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">may be as much as 30% larger than earlier measurements suggested.</a> Part of that could be due to the additional trunks the Redwoods can grow as they age, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">a process known as reiteration</a>.</p>New 3D measurements of large redwood trees for biomass and structure. Nature / UCL
<p>Measuring the trees more accurately is important because carbon capture will probably play a key role in the battle against climate change. Forest <a href="https://www.wri.org/blog/2020/09/carbon-sequestration-natural-forest-regrowth" target="_blank">growth could absorb billions of tons</a> of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.</p><p>"The importance of big trees is widely-recognised in terms of carbon storage, demographics and impact on their surrounding ecosystems," the authors wrote<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank"> in the journal Nature</a>. "Unfortunately the importance of big trees is in direct proportion to the difficulty of measuring them."</p><p>Redwoods are so long lived because of their ability to <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cope with climate change, resist disease and even survive fire damage</a>, the scientists say. Almost a fifth of their volume may be bark, which helps protect them.</p>Carbon Capture Champions
<p><span>Earlier research by scientists at Humboldt University and the University of Washington found that </span><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112716302584" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Redwood forests store almost 2,600 tonnes of carbon per hectare</a><span>, their bark alone containing more carbon than any other neighboring species.</span></p><p>While the importance of trees in fighting climate change is widely accepted, not all species enjoy the same protection as California's coastal Redwoods. In 2019 the world lost the equivalent of <a href="https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/deforestation-and-forest-degradation" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">30 soccer fields of forest cover every minute</a>, due to agricultural expansion, logging and fires, according to The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).</p>Pixabay
<p>Although <a href="https://c402277.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/publications/1420/files/original/Deforestation_fronts_-_drivers_and_responses_in_a_changing_world_-_full_report_%281%29.pdf?1610810475" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the rate of loss is reported to have slowed in recent years</a>, reforesting the world to help stem climate change is a massive task.</p><p><span>That's why the World Economic Forum launched the Trillion Trees Challenge (</span><a href="https://www.1t.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">1t.org</a><span>) and is engaging organizations and individuals across the globe through its </span><a href="https://uplink.weforum.org/uplink/s/uplink-issue/a002o00000vOf09AAC/trillion-trees" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Uplink innovation crowdsourcing platform</a><span> to support the project.</span></p><p>That's backed up by research led by ETH Zurich/Crowther Lab showing there's potential to restore tree coverage across 2.2 billion acres of degraded land.</p><p>"Forests are critical to the health of the planet," according to <a href="https://www.1t.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">1t.org</a>. "They sequester carbon, regulate global temperatures and freshwater flows, recharge groundwater, anchor fertile soil and act as flood barriers."</p><p><em data-redactor-tag="em" data-verified="redactor">Reposted with permission from the </em><span><em data-redactor-tag="em" data-verified="redactor"><a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/redwoods-store-more-co2-and-are-more-enormous-than-we-thought/" target="_blank">World Economic Forum</a>.</em></span></p>EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
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Kentucky is coping with historic flooding after a weekend of record-breaking rainfall, enduring water rescues, evacuations and emergency declarations.
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